No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives

Steven Belletto

Abstract

This book argues that chance became a complex yet conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of thinkers—politicians, novelists, historians, biologists, sociologists, and others—contended that totalitarianism denied the very existence and operation of chance in the world. This contention often worked by claiming that the Soviet system perpetrated a vast fiction on its population, a fiction made visible by the Soviet view that there is no such thing as chance or accident, only manifestations of historical law (hence the refrain from which the title is taken: “It was no acci ... More

This book argues that chance became a complex yet conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of thinkers—politicians, novelists, historians, biologists, sociologists, and others—contended that totalitarianism denied the very existence and operation of chance in the world. This contention often worked by claiming that the Soviet system perpetrated a vast fiction on its population, a fiction made visible by the Soviet view that there is no such thing as chance or accident, only manifestations of historical law (hence the refrain from which the title is taken: “It was no accident, Comrade,” which encapsulates a popular American understanding of Marxism). No Accident, Comrade explains how the association of chance with democratic freedom and the denial of chance with totalitarianism circulated in Cold War culture, and then uses this opposition as a starting point for a discussion of the period’s literature. I show how writers innovated strategies for dealing with and incorporating chance, which allowed them to theorize the ever-changing relationship between the individual and the state during a largely rhetorical conflict. Indeed, by emphasizing the Cold War’s narrative quality—that is, by viewing it as a rhetorical field—this book likewise argues that pressure was put on fictional narratives in general, and that if we attune ourselves to the uses of chance in such material, we can understand how the Cold War encouraged new relationships between aesthetics and politics.

End Matter

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